The present invention relates to a nonwoven material produced by hydroentangling a fibre web.
Hydroentangling or spunlacing is a technique which was introduced in the 1970's, see e.g. CA patent No. 841,938. The method involves forming a fibre web, either dry-laid or wet-laid, whereafter the fibres are entangled, i.e. tangled together by means of very fine water-jets under high pressure. A plurality of rows of water-jets are directed at the fibre web which is supported by a moving wire (mesh). The entangled fabric is then dried. The fibres which are used in the material can be constituted by staple fibres, e.g. polyester, rayon, nylon, polypropylene and the like, by pulp fibres or by mixtures of pulp fibres and staple fibres. Spunlace materials can be produced cheaply and presents high absorption characteristics. Amongst other things they are used as drying materials for household or industrial use and as disposable materials within the field of health-care etc.
Increased environmental awareness has led to the fact that a sparing use of our natural resources in the form of raw materials and sources of energy etc. is more and more often viewed as being a matter of course. Recycling of paper fibres by collection of returned paper and textiles to charity collections has been known for a long time and is used commercially today for producing new products which function perfectly well.
Nonwoven waste of e.g. spunlace type can be recycled by melting it down into plastic granulate which can be used for production of new synthetic fibres. This presupposes that the waste is constituted by relatively "clean" synthetic material based on thermoplastic synthetic fibres. One example is recycling of polyester from bottles for producing polyester fibres which are used for carpet manufacture.
It is also known to mechanically shred nonwoven and textile waste and to use the freed recycled fibres. In this case, mixed waste comprising both synthetic and natural fibres can even be used. New materials for, for instance, sound insulation, filters and geotextiles can be produced from the recycled fibres by thermobinding, needling or adhesive binding.
A large portion of the production waste from nonwoven manufacture however presently goes to dumps as landfill or to waste incineration plants. Such production waste emanates from edge-trimming of the material webs, start-up waste and material which is discarded for various reasons. To the nonwoven waste is added used material as well as production waste.